Analyzing a Decade of Research on Six Sigma and Lean Management for Innovation
Purpose – For companies globally, Innovation and creativity has long been the most critical factor to their success. In order to stay competitive, retain its customers base and maintain its market position, a company cannot rely solely on its past achievements or progress. In today’s fiercely competitive market companies need to continuously keep working on gaining competitive advantage which may result in new products or services. Innovation is the key to survive in business today. Six sigma and lean management together can help create and deliver new value to customers. Six sigma & lean are approaches to improvement and creativity. While Lean focuses on creating value and eliminating any waste from the system, increasing the velocity of organizational processes, six sigma focuses more on the elimination of errors through reducing variation in the processes. Together six sigma and lean provides an approach with tools and techniques to increase organizational efficiency through reducing eliminating wastes and increasing velocity through reducing errors. While aligning with business strategies six sigma & lean can create a new strategic focus which is novel to the traditional innovation.This research attempts to map the global research on six sigma in the context of lean project management for innovation. Design/methodology/approach - The research is based on top 1000 search results obtained through Publish or Perish software, by querying Google Scholar. The paper presents an analysis using data analytics techniques. The findings reveal the important keywords in the domain in the past decade, as well as an evolution of the research field. The research aims to provide an understanding of the current status and future trends for research, for enhancing innovation in the government sector, business world, and industry.
